In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity around the world. Many advanced networks offer wireless mobile communication service for voice calls, mobile messaging (e.g. text and/or multimedia-based messaging) and data communications. Increasingly, many users opt for smartphone-type mobile devices that support these various types of communications as well as a variety of standalone application functions within one device. More recently, other types of mobile devices, such as book readers and tablet computers, have been adapted to have integral mobile communication capabilities, and thus offer even more sophisticated mobile device capabilities and functionality.
Increased mobile device functionality, for example, the use of certain types of transceivers, larger displays, a global positioning satellite (GPS) receiver, or the like, comes at a cost: it increases the power consumption of the mobile device. Features (or circuitry) supporting multimedia-based applications, like faster processors, bigger displays, and higher bandwidth transceivers, all correlate with higher battery consumption.
Mobile device form factors range from traditional feature phones to sophisticated smartphones and tablets with many of these features and power consuming components. The small form factors of mobile devices place constraints on the size of batteries that such mobile devices can utilize. Although batteries continue to evolve, the capabilities of small batteries that can be utilized in a mobile device tend to limit the battery usage time between charges for the mobile device. On the other hand, there is a continuing desire for increased battery life between charging cycles.
More applications to manage and more settings to control mean that the user interface on these mobile devices is becoming more and more complex. Many users are, however, not even aware of what consumes their battery power, and if they are, they often do not know how to optimize battery settings for their personal situations. To make matters worse, most mobile devices do not have very sophisticated, native battery management tools. If provided at all, such tools often make estimates of battery level that are not very granular or accurate.
New chips (or integrated circuits) that closely monitor power consumption of mobile devices have recently become available. These new chips, sometimes referred to as “fuel gauge” chips for batteries, greatly increase the accuracy of battery level estimation and are starting to enter the market as their price per unit become affordable to mobile device manufacturers.
While these new chips are starting to hit the market and the needs of consumers in the area of mobile device battery management are expanding, controls available through the device user interface are still very basic and limited. User interfaces that visualize battery consumption and provide solutions to increase efficiency in battery management are not readily available to users.
As an illustration, FIGS. 1A and 1B show a couple of screens of an existing user interface available in Android based mobile devices today. As illustrated in FIG. 1A, the user interface allows a user to view various applications and services that are currently running on an Android based mobile device. Also, the user can see battery usage of each application and/or service. In addition, if desired, the user can select an application or service that is running and from a screen like that of FIG. 1B, can forcibly stop or uninstall the selected application or service. However, the user cannot predict the effect of terminating a particular application or service on estimated battery life of the mobile device. Further, the user interface requires the user to access battery management functions only through settings of the mobile device; and thus in order to access the battery management functions, the user must navigate through various setting screens.
Hence, there is room for still further improvement in providing battery management functions for mobile devices and associated graphical user interfaces.